


the agnostic twelve steps

by gayreids



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: 12 steps, Angst, Charles Hankel - Freeform, Dilaudid, Drug Use, First Kiss, Fluff, Heavy Angst, Recovery, Self-Esteem Issues, Substance Abuse, The 12 Steps, Tobias Hankel - Freeform, Whump, but also very eventually, but very eventually
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-07-02 02:15:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15786882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gayreids/pseuds/gayreids
Summary: in front of the underpass in the dark underbelly of d.c.





	1. step one

_"we admitted to ourselves that we were powerless over our substance - that our lives had become unmanagable"_

he waited in front of the underpass in the dark underbelly of d.c. . he tried to draw attention away from himself _(because he was ashamed)_ so that he wouldn't be recognised, making himself smaller if possible with big, dark clothes and a habit of hunching in on himself that had only worsened in the last few weeks. spencer pulled the hood of his sweater, rubbing the soft fabric between his fingers in a vain attempt to self soothe, checking his phone and cursing internally at the unreliable punctuality of his dealer. he stopped rubbing his sweater hood and moved his fingers to the strings protruding just below, twirling them around his hand. spencer had learned a week before to always have spare vials on him and in his apartment in case he started withdrawing. he'd shot up while waiting for the dealer once, and the man had amped up the price after noticing spencer was high. he probably thought that he was too far gone to notice any difference (which he was, but that's besides the point).  
he would've turned on his heel and gone straight home if he didn't need his substance so badly. his psychological and physiological dependency on dilaudid had made him into a different person, it seemed.   
_(maybe spencer hadn't become a different person. maybe he'd just uncovered what lay beneath the anxiety and overwhelming urge to please everybody he came across.)_  
after he'd spent an infinite amount of time in his own head, he noticed another hooded figure heading toward him.   
three vials were pressed into his palm and a price was whispered in his ear. the words felt hot and sticky, the person's breath climbing inside his ear and making a home there. spencer paid with bank notes before turning and walking away, promising himself that this was the last time he'd take part in this horrible dance.   
-  
bouncing his thoughts like a ball against the wall of his room, spencer picked apart the most recent life changing event. he'd been kidnapped by a religious zealot with three identities and been made into an addict against his own will, officially dying before coming back to life in a mess of his own saliva and hair stuck to his face.  
 _addict._  
that word rolled out of his brain and landed with a wet splat into the palms of his sweaty hands. it was fine to speak objectively about the harms of addiction and it was easy to sympathise without really caring until it was happening to him. it happened to spencer over and over again over two days before he then did it to himself. he stuck the needle in his arm, taking advantage of his knowledge of human anatomy to know which vein to pierce if he wanted the quickest effect. tobias' drugs were better; they'd been cut with psychedelics and they got him so high that eventually he forgot his name and where he was. eventually it had become swirling colours and dizziness, even though he was strapped to a chair in a dimly lit shed. his own dilaudid worked, though. he tried not to miss the psychedelic element of the highs and he tried not to buy whatever one he could get his hands on and take that and the dilaudid at the same time. before almost anything else at that time, spencer was an addict. when he tried, he didn't try for long, too consumed by emptiness and his own perceived inadequacy to care what would happen to him. the cocktail of drugs had mostly worked, apart from one incident where he'd nearly called an ambulance because he felt like his heart was failing and it brought him back to that damned shed and the smell of smoked fish mixed with blood.   
if spencer had to redo the hankel incident, he wouldn't change a thing. as much as this drug was ruining his life, he was glad it was him and not somebody else. maybe it was a fucked up saviour complex (apart from the fact that he hadn't put the danger there on purpose) but he loved his friends too deeply to let this addiction fall into them like it'd fallen into him.   
when spencer regained enough awareness to register surroundings, he found that he wasn't in his bedroom anymore. he was in his kitchen and he was gripping a knife so tightly that his knuckles turned a few shades lighter than they normally would be. he had sores, cuts, and bruises littered over both of his hands. some were for inducing vomiting once he'd gotten to be alone in his hospital room after the hankel incident and the others were from punching anything hard that he came into contact with once he'd gotten home after that. they still hadn't healed properly even though it'd been almost a month but that was spencer's fault, mostly; between being high and being at work, he was lucky if he ate more than 3 meals in a week. no human body could heal on an average of 700 calories a week.   
spencer was ashamed of how he was living, and the fact that he could still form that thought while he was intoxicated spoke to just how ashamed he was (or maybe it just meant that he was building a tolerance to the drug and needed more of it for the same effect as the _first time_ ).   
how many killers and rapists and heaven knew who else had he needed to profile and track down simply because they needed to recreate that _first time_? whatever that _first_ was, it came right back to bite them in the ass once they realised that while nothing would never be as good as that _first_ whine, scream, beg, or terrified look, they were never going to stop trying until they were caught.   
being so easily comparable to an unsub made spencer want to turn himself inside out but really, what more did he have to lose? he'd lost everything over the past year, so why not lose his dignity too?   
stirring on the floor next to his bed, spencer realised he needed to get up and inject more clear liquid if he was to actually be high. he'd definitely built up a tolerance and the last thing he wanted was to put thoughts together while he was trying to escape them.   
reaching a hand back behind him to the surface of the bed where he'd thrown the glass bottles, he froze, drawing his hand back. he'd just compared himself to a murderer in his head and he was going to carry on using the very drug that had blurred the lines between him and them? sighing but still feeling the pull towards the illicit substance, spencer fought with himself on whether this struggle was worth it. he wondered if shooting up quarter doses in a bathroom at work just to tide him over on a wave of serenity while his team were none the wiser was worth the guilt. he wondered if risking being incapacitated when he got a phone call from hotch bearing a case was worth the panic. most of all, he wondered if not having the ability to look his mentor in the eyes because he knew about the gaping wound left behind but was unwilling to fix it was worth the debilitating, ground breaking shame.   
no, spencer decided, it wasn't.


	2. step two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> he was a muted version of the person he wanted to be when he was incapacitated.

_"we came to believe and to accept that we needed strengths beyond our awareness and resources to restore us to sanity."_

stumbling around d.c. in the dark, spencer couldn't help but gape detatchedly at the lights on top of the buildings. they were so much taller than him and part of something bigger than themselves- ( _pollution and global warming_ ) the mass and twist of towering concrete in the city he was happy to call his current dwelling place.  
spencer was shaking because he was always shaking these days. addicts never tell the truth, especially to themselves, so spencer had shot up the very day after promising himself he wouldn't. spencer was many things, but in the current position he'd found himself in, he was an addict first and foremost. during the first few weeks of indulging in his guilty, self destructive habit, he'd adamantly refused to let it define him, even inside his own head. eventually, that fire was doused and spencer spent his days numb to the bone, only barely getting through each working day.  
the second rule of being an addict: _addicts never keep promises, especially to themselves._  
no matter how many good intentions he had, spencer was so small and the world was so big. what was his self destruction going to cost the universe apart from a couple hospital stays before his premature demise? cars roared past spencer on the main road and he realised with a jolt that he'd stopped walking maybe half a minute ago and that he was simply standing slouched forward with his eyes so vacant he was sure an outsider would mistake him for a dead body if he wasn't on his feet.  
the city air pressed in on spencer, urging his bare feet to trudge along the strip full of twenty four hour fast food shops and prostitutes. the smell of cigarettes was in the air and he could have tasted it if he opened his mouth.  
the dark eyes of a working girl raked over him in a passive movement, gauging just how high he was in relation to herself. spencer hoped he'd convinced the girl to go home. it was so unsafe out here. anybody could get their hands on her and do unspeakable things that would make his blood run cold if he wasn't so damn tired that he needed to consciously remind himself to keep his own heart pumping. he felt drearily protective over that girl, even though she was out of his sight now. spencer thought to himself that he'd never forget the girl's eyes and how dead they looked but then again, addicts never tell the truth, especially to themselves.  
he didn't know where he was going or how he was going to get there or even why he was in his pajamas and why he didn't have shoes or socks on but what he did know was that the heart rate of a hummingbird was roughly two hundred and fifty beats per minute when it was resting and could reach up to one thousand two hundred beats per minute during flight. spencer felt like his heart was beating at twice that rate, even though he was currently on a depressant narcotic.  
stumbling around even more and gaining looks ranging from disgust to pity from other people on the street, spencer found himself throwing up in some person's front garden. he managed to get vomit in their rose bush, too, and those weren't easy to grow in the city. he wiped his mouth, looking regretfully at the damage and setting out back home. the marring of something so beautiful and rare by his vomit made him feel downtrodden, as if he was the one who'd been thrown up on.  
he was still riding the wave of a high when he got back to his apartment, even though it wasn't nearly as strong as it had been before he'd thrown up. spencer's hands were shaking so hard that he dropped his keys four times trying to get into the door before almost punching it in frustration. he got into his apartment on the fith try.  
he flopped down onto his couch after taking the few tentative steps necessary to get to his living room. he slept on that couch more often than not these days because most of the time, he hated being confined to the same few walls when he was high. part of the reason why he did _it_  
was because he was a muted version of the person he wanted to be when he was incapacitated. somewhere along the way, along the road less travelled that he'd decided to walk down when he was twelve and had started college, spencer had stopped being himself and started being the person he thought he should be. twenty years later, it turned out that he hated his decades old persona but he didn't know who he was after all his self defence mechanisms were stripped away.  
groaning and dragging his hand over his face, spencer braced himself for the comedown that was imminent. he started counting the fibonacci sequence until the stomach cramps made their appearance, making it impossible to focus on anything but the pain. it came in waves and he tried to close his eyes (as if that was going to make any of this _better_ ) but within minutes, he was writhing in near agony. the only thing that had ever hurt this much was being resurrected in tobias' shed.  
without thinking, spencer patted his pockets down, gritting his teeth while trying to find his phone. realising that he'd left it on his bed before he'd gone out so that he wouldn't receive any calls, spencer nearly shouted in frustration. the only clear train of thought he had was a steady stream of obscenities.  
he grapsed the coffee table lying directly in front of his head and pulled himself up with both arms, his sweat pouring off him and his teeth chattering. each second seemed to drag on for so long that you could hear it, and spencer heard a low clang of haphazard attempts to play chords on a piano.  
finally standing up, spencer let himself shout for a single second before he tried with all his might to focus on getting to his bedroom. it was only ten metres or so away but it felt like he was asking his legs to take him to the end of the world.  
when he finally got there (two collapses and a coughing fit later) he unlocked his phone and selected the member of his team that came first alphabetically. spencer couldn't find the will to even slightly think through his decision, even when the phone was ringing through.  
silence.  
and then,  
"hello?" a disgruntled penelope whispered, obviously annoyed at being woken up at heaven knows what time at night.  
spencer hung up almost immediately, cringing at the hostile tone. a few seconds later, he got a call back ( _decline_ ) and another ( _decline_ ) and a message that he deleted as soon as it came through.  
spencer remembered that he was standing with no reason to, so he gingerly sat on the bed, stabbing the next contact with his finger and lifting his phone to his ear.  
"hotchner," a tired yet authoritative voice answered.  
"h- hotch?" spencer choked out, mind half gone in the comedown and half in embarrassment.  
there was a brief pause and some shuffling before aaron asked if spencer was in his apartment. he nodded in reply but realised too late that his boss couldn't really see him through the phone. he started giggling at himself but the laughs eventually turned into sobs, rolling his shoulders making his body jump as if he was a marionette and his misery was the puppet master.  
"hotch--" he gasped between cries "--i need... need help." spencer threw his words into the phone more than he spoke them. he could hear hotch's voice telling him to _calm down_ and that _he's almost there, just breathe_.  
the last thought spencer had before falling unconscious was that he'd need some sort of miracle to get himself even one foot out of the grave he'd dug himself. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just in case u were confused at penelope being the first alphabetically, spencer has his contacts listed by last name, not first. also, i'm using the season three cast (if u squint at the chapter before this one, u can see that gideon's just left).


End file.
